For sheer ambition alone, you’ve simply got to give it up to your man The Kiss That Took A Trip, AKA M.D. Trello. Dude’s put together a double album spanning 30 songs. When’s the last time you heard that? Never? And, so much for this 12-cut stuff, or today’s equivalent of eight or nine tracks being called an album.

Moreover, Kiss really knows what he’s doing. That is, when he’s on the boards, dropping the tracks, hitting the vocal booth, or even getting going with the pen and pad for his songwriting material. The production is smooth, well-thought out, and sincere in the numerous directions and trajectories in which the artist takes the listener.

Plus, when that’s at the beginning of the first of the two albums, it’s definitely headed the right way. “Skull and Crossbones”, for example, is largely bereft of peccadilloes. The bass line is something to move to—as in, time and time again. Plus the cut clocks in at an easy, breezy pace, rides a winner of a piano on the second verse, and achieves that rare, and most notable of feats—it manages to be beating on its own with just the drums and the bass.

Vocally, Kiss sticks to his strengths on this outing. He’s got a heavy, deep-sounding voice that is deceptively nimble in its inflections, particularly for higher notes, and is good to listen to. He doesn’t necessarily sing so much as he chants, making the most of the vocal effects. But to his credit, Kiss has an undeniable proclivity for coming up with winning melodies, the type that make hearing his tunes as natural, and easygoing, as riding a bike.

The fact that the artist is able to come up with delightful melodies consistently throughout the numerous songs definitely avails him. Check the keyboard work on “Mimosa” for a good dose of this quality. It springs up out of nowhere, chiming in and making the tune smile in places where it likely wouldn’t have, otherwise. Such instrumentation is far from a fluke. It’s one of the hallmarks of the collection, frankly, and something that makes this album a keeper.